Palm Springs the new hipster hangout? You bet

Desert oasis no longer just for retirees and snowbirds — cool cats like DiCaprio are moving in

Rancho Las Palmas is one of the Palm Springs resorts folk are flocking to as the desert town reinvents hip.

Photograph by: Shelley Fralic

It is, as the locals are saying these days, not just your grandparents’ vacation spot any more.

The “it” refers to Palm Springs, which is not only undergoing something of a cultural renaissance but has become just about the hippest hot spot this side of Brooklyn.

Only with 300 days of sunshine.

Some would say Palm Springs has regained its crown as a southern Californian playground for the rich and famous, a nod to the mid-1900s when the movie stars piled into their convertibles every weekend and headed for the desert, for the putting greens and swimming pools, to relax in the sun and revel in the clubs, only two hours from the coast but far from madding crowd of Hollywood and studio bosses. It’s here, in the heart of the Coachella Valley, that Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack buddies sipped cocktails around his piano-shaped swimming pool. It’s here where back lot A-listers like Marilyn Monroe, Steve McQueen, Clark Gable, Jack Benny, Cary Grant, Elvis Presley, Dinah Shore and Bob Hope fled for happy hour.

And it’s here, half a century later and decades after Palm Springs settled into a sleepy getaway for the well-heeled golf crowd, that a new generation of youngbloods is putting a new pep in the desert’s step, having rediscovered a desert gem trapped in a retro time warp.

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is moving in, Jimmy Choos are on sale at the outlet mall, and thousands of visitors hit the city limits every year to take in the music, art and film festivals, Modernism Week, the BNP Parabis Tennis Tournament, the polo matches, VillageFest and more mid-century modern shopping and golf course putting greens than one can imagine.

Yes, Palm Springs remains the home of the most Bentleys per capita in the country and it’s still the No. 1 choice of many baby boomer snowbirds, Canadians included. But it’s also become a magnet for a new generation attracted by its reinvigorated and decidedly artsy culture.

Palm Springs is back on the hipster map.

Some would say this new Palm Springs owes its 21st-century renaissance to the resurgence of interest in mid-century modern design, for it’s here in the hot, dry desert that the best of American mid-century residential design had made its mark, where the work of architects like Richard Neutra, Donald Wexler, John Lautner, E. Stewart Williams and William Krisel plied their trade, building thousands of airy elegant one-storey homes distinguished by their clean lines, walls of glass and inside-outside features.

Joyce Kiehl, media manager for the Greater Palm Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau, moved to Palm Springs from the San Francisco Bay area five years ago, at a time when the town was undergoing a shift, both in its physical presence and in the notion that it was the new place to be, and be seen.

“I came right at the edge of that. The Riviera (hotel) was just being remodelled. The Ace was getting ready to open, the Saguaro ... you could tell it was just starting to open people’s eyes.”

Palm Springs, population 40,000 and untold palm trees, is one of nine small towns running the length of the picturesque Coachella Valley, a one-time spa destination that today counts sister cities Desert Hot Springs to the north and Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta and Indio to the southeast.

Settled centuries ago by the Agua Calienti Band of Cahuilla Indians, much of the valley, flanked by the San Jacinto, Santa Rosa and Little San Bernardino mountain ranges, is still native-owned.

The area, with its dry desert air, warm days and balmy nights, not to mention the low-profile urban landscape set off by that ring of pretty mountains and stunning sunsets, has long been a Canadian vacation stronghold, attracting snowbirds and investors alike, so much so that the local newspaper, The Desert Sun, publishes a regular Canadian “corner.”

In mid-March, the paper reported on the second annual Canada Fest held in Indian Wells, a networking event that offered investment information along with poutine, beaver tails, Nanaimo bars and Coffee Crisp chocolate bars.

But it’s the new younger wave of migrants — mostly from the big cities on the California coast — that’s changing the once-sleepy enclave’s vibe.

“For a small city, it has a strong metropolitan feel,” says local realtor Paul Kaplan, whose stock in trade is the mid-century modern. “There’s an appreciation for the arts here. It’s become the hip fun place to be.”

Michael Stern, author of a mid-century coffee table tome titled Julius Shulman: Palm Springs, knows a thing or two about the local culture, and laughs when asked about the composition of the population in 2014 and, more pointedly, where all the children are hiding.

“Well, here’s what we say about the population of Palm Springs these days,” says Stern. “Fifty per cent rich and retired, 45 per cent gay and five per cent members of the Manson family,” the latter referring to the so-called “desert rats” who live on the outskirts of town.

It all makes for an eclectic mix, one that is increasingly putting the Coachella Valley on the map as the place to not only party on vacation, but to settle in for good.

How hip is Palm Springs these days?

Forget the polo club and the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, where thousands were grooving under the desert sky to Outkast, Lorde, Arcade Fire, Beck and Pharrell Williams earlier this month.

Forget the respected Palm Springs Art Museum, and the PNB Parabis Open in Indian Wells, which attracts 400,000 international tennis fans every March.

Forget the Uptown Design District with its trendy retailers, with stores like Just Fabulous and Trina Turk and margarita bars and mid-century furniture shops.

Forget the Food and Wine Festival, and Fashion Week, in mid-March, and the Bearfoot Inn, a gays-only hotel that opened last year in the Movie Colony District, or those reborn Howard Johnsons and Holiday Inns that are now modernized hotels with names like Ace and Saguaro, celebrated for their nightly pool parties where if you aren’t pretty and partial to Prosecco you’d better move on down the road to the quieter clubs of Palm Desert.

Forget that it’s so worth the trek out to Desert Hot Springs, and the unlikely situated but utterly sublime four-unit Hotel Lautner, a private compound that has a little dipping pool, to-die-for sunset views and couldn’t be more perfect for an intimate wedding or, better yet, a girls-only weekend.

Forget, too, that DiCaprio just dropped $5.1 million — perfectly timed, it was, during February’s Modernism Week — for Dinah Shore’s house, a six-bedroom, eight-bathroom mid-century Palm Springs stunner designed by Donald Wexler and built in 1965.

Because while all those places to go and things to do and people to see might well be the bellwether signs of Palm Springs 2.0, it’s perhaps the latest hipster to hit the desert that really tells the 21st-century story of a little city that’s experiencing something of a rebirth.

This year, Facebook millionaire Ezra Callahan, who was one of the social site’s first employees and reportedly walked away with $60 million in his pocket, is about to open his own Chris Pardo-designed modernist 32-room boutique hotel right on North Palm Canyon in Palm Springs, all kitted out with luxury amenities and sustainable sensibilities.

Callahan is calling his new venture Arrive and, in announcing the project, vowed it will “appeal to travellers influenced by style, design and culture, and those who view travel as a social experience.”

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